Museum Day

I wore sensible shoes to a museum and spent half the day feeling betrayed by how correct the decision was. #

Museum day, and I wore comfortable shoes. Please allow the significance of this to settle. There was a time when I would have chosen the shoes that completed the outfit and then spent three hours pretending my feet were not sending distress signals. Thirty has brought wisdom, or at least better insoles. I still dressed nicely because museum days make me want to. Black trousers, soft top, little earrings, hair behaving for once, perfume light enough not to announce me before I entered a room. The comfortable shoes actually looked fine. Growth. Yuri and I went together but separated naturally once inside, which is how we have learned to do museums without making each other insane. I hate the feeling of matching somebody else’s viewing speed. Sometimes I want to stand before one thing for ten minutes. Sometimes something famous leaves me cold and a tiny detail in a less celebrated work catches me completely. Yuri is the same in his own way. So we wander apart, occasionally reappear beside each other, point something out, disappear again. It is oddly intimate. Trusting that the other person will still be somewhere in the building. Today I kept noticing hands in paintings. Not deliberately at first. A hand holding fabric. Fingers around an object. A hand resting on a table. Then I became aware of the pattern and started looking for them. Painted hands are strange because they carry so much information without moving. Work, wealth, age, tension, softness, gesture. I took no photographs of some things because I wanted to look rather than collect. I took too many of other details. Balance. At one point I found Yuri again and he showed me something I had walked past. This always happens. Two people can cross the same rooms and leave with different museums. We had coffee afterward and compared what we had noticed. My feet did not hurt. I mentioned this more than once because apparently sensible footwear requires celebration. We walked home for part of the way, Amsterdam bright and busy around us. Museum days do something to my eyes. For an hour afterward everything looks composed. Window, bicycle, brick, person in red coat, reflection. I see frames everywhere. By the time we got home the effect had softened. I changed into old clothes, because aesthetic sensitivity has limits, and imported photographs. Mom called while I was doing it. I told her I had worn comfortable shoes. «Finally.» No praise. Just vindication. Mothers wait decades for these moments. Tonight one image from the museum keeps returning, not even one I photographed. Good. Something escaped the camera and stayed anyway.

Remember me, Eclipse.